State budget: A pay raise for every teacher

Published: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 at 07:25 PM.

When the North Carolina House and Senate passed the state budget over the weekend, one of the biggest amendments to stand out was an average 7 percent pay increase for public school teachers.

While teacher pay is increasing by an average of 7 percent across the board, it doesn’t mean every teacher is getting a 7 percent raise. Teachers with five and six years of experience will be given the largest bump in pay at 18.5 percent. Teachers with 30 years of experience will be given the lowest pay increase at only .3 percent.

“When you are dealing with K-12 education, the issue we face with the budget is one of how to provided raises for teachers,” N.C. Rep. John Bell, R-Wayne, said. “We were in a position on the House side, that not only did we want to raise entry-level teacher pay but we wanted to make sure all teachers got a raise.”

Bell said the budget reintroduced the step program with salary step scales.

“With the step pay scale, it not only gave veteran teachers a pay raise, but it also showed teachers a way to move up the ladder and increase their pay,” he said. “The issue is that when you increase entry level pay, then you have the next group of teachers that are in their eighth and ninth year that you need to increase their pay, too. That’s where some of the larger raises came in. Some other folks will experience a raise this year and then may gain a step next year. It just depends on where a teacher falls on the step scale.”

The step scale calls for teachers to get a raise once every five years and then plateau for four years until they reach the next step.

Bell said the new system is designed to attract and keep the best and brightest possible while bringing in North Carolina teacher pay up to par and beyond the pay offered in other neighboring states. Bell said he and his colleagues also had to consider helping out other groups, not just teachers, when they made their decisions. The budget gives most other state employees a $1,000 pay raise and five extra vacation days.

When the North Carolina House and Senate passed the state budget over the weekend, one of the biggest amendments to stand out was an average 7 percent pay increase for public school teachers.

While teacher pay is increasing by an average of 7 percent across the board, it doesn’t mean every teacher is getting a 7 percent raise. Teachers with five and six years of experience will be given the largest bump in pay at 18.5 percent. Teachers with 30 years of experience will be given the lowest pay increase at only .3 percent.

“When you are dealing with K-12 education, the issue we face with the budget is one of how to provided raises for teachers,” N.C. Rep. John Bell, R-Wayne, said. “We were in a position on the House side, that not only did we want to raise entry-level teacher pay but we wanted to make sure all teachers got a raise.”

Bell said the budget reintroduced the step program with salary step scales.

“With the step pay scale, it not only gave veteran teachers a pay raise, but it also showed teachers a way to move up the ladder and increase their pay,” he said. “The issue is that when you increase entry level pay, then you have the next group of teachers that are in their eighth and ninth year that you need to increase their pay, too. That’s where some of the larger raises came in. Some other folks will experience a raise this year and then may gain a step next year. It just depends on where a teacher falls on the step scale.”

The step scale calls for teachers to get a raise once every five years and then plateau for four years until they reach the next step.

Bell said the new system is designed to attract and keep the best and brightest possible while bringing in North Carolina teacher pay up to par and beyond the pay offered in other neighboring states.
Bell said he and his colleagues also had to consider helping out other groups, not just teachers, when they made their decisions. The budget gives most other state employees a $1,000 pay raise and five extra vacation days.

“We have the Caswell Center in Lenoir County, which has a lot of state employees, and also the Department of Transportation,” he said. “It was imperative that we were able to do across the board raises and people were appreciative of that. Hopefully we will be able to do more down the line, but for now it’s a good start.”

Lenoir County Public Schools spokesman Patrick Holmes said the district still needs to sift through the numbers before it can determine the exact impact of the budget on Lenoir County.

“We will have to wait and see how other aspects of the budget related to education play out in terms of actual operating revenue for Lenoir County Public Schools,” he said. “Overall the state money for teacher assistants was reduced by 22 percent, which is an aspect that is not getting much attention. We don’t know how that will play out here. I think overall the budget is less friendly to education than Republicans in the General Assembly would like North Carolinians to believe.”

As a whole, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction was cut by 10 percent, or $5 million.

“It’s what we have to work with and we will do the best we can,” Holmes said.

Holmes said that he saw both winners and losers in the budget.

“The teacher raises are appreciated, particularly by those in the middle tier of experience who got the largest raises,” he said. “There is some concern about longevity pay being ended and how that money was folded to create the so-called raises for more experience teachers.”

Greene County Superintendent Patrick Miller said the final budget landed in the middle of the House and Senate proposals, which is what he expected.

“I’m sorry to see that teaching assistants were cut, which I learned about during a budget webinar with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction on Friday, that’s very concerning,” he said. “The good news is that there is a raise for teachers. For those who have less than 10 years of experience, it’s a very nice raise. For those that were receiving longevity, it’s not quite as generous, but nevertheless it is a raise. I’m disappointed that other areas of our budget had to be cut to support that raise.”

Bell said teaching assistant positions did not get cut, the state just allowed districts more flexibility with which to use funds.

“We were able to keep teaching assistants in the classroom, but also offer the local county offices the flexibility to do what they needed to do,” he said. “When you are talking with a superintendent, they want the flexibility to manage their school system the way they see fit. They can use their funds to keep teaching assistants in the classroom or recruit new teachers because they know the needs of individual schools better than the state does.”

Holmes said the school system is still prepared to go ahead with its planned one-to-one technology initiative.

“We’ve done our professional development training in the summer and we’ve worked on contracts with Apple,” he said. “We are sitting on go, but we have to assess the impact of the actual numbers that we are going to be able to cull out of this big state budget and its impact on personnel along with other things that we are committed to doing before we move forward.”

Noah Clark can be reached at 252-559-1073 or Noah.Clark@Kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @nclark763.

Other education budget highlights:

Spend nearly $42 million to reduce class sizes in kindergarten to 18 children per teacher and to 17 students per teacher in first grade, an increase of 760 jobs
Eliminate funding for the Teaching Fellows program, which gives college scholarships to students in exchange for working as educators
Direct public schools to stock epinephrine injectors, commonly known as EpiPens, to treat someone suffering from an extreme allergic reaction
Set up an education endowment fund which can collect donations from corporations and people who want to increase teacher pay
Order the State Board of Education to authorize a virtual charter school, a type of online-only school that has faced criticism over lack of academic quality and oversight